Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

April 16, 2018

“Well, Paul Ryan, you’re a free man now,” began the New York Times editorial that appeared on April 11, the day the Wisconsin congressman announced he’d be stepping down as House speaker and leaving Congress in January. Three paragraphs down, the editorial counseled Ryan about how to put his liberation to good use:

You don’t have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You don’t have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.

To truckle before stands out in that paragraph. Its meaning is clear enough in context – something about deference, obsequiousness, sycophancy – but where does it come from?

April 09, 2018

Nasim Najafi Aghdam, the 39-year-old woman who shot three people at YouTube’s San Bruno, California, headquarters on April 3 before killing herself, is said to have been angry about the company’s policies, especially demonetization. According to an article in Entrepreneur, she had written on her website: “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”

March 19, 2018

“Is there a Trump firing bracket?” asked Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Turning Points Memo on Twitter. It was the beginning of March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball championship, and the middle – or the beginning of the middle, or the end of the beginning – of a dizzying string of dismissals from the White House. The latest departure: FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, two days before he would have been eligible to retire with his full pension.

February 26, 2018

On February 22 – the birthday of America’s first president, George Washington – @RealDonaldTrump rose early and poked out a farrago of tweets – seven in all – proffering his theories about guns, schools, and a “GREAT DETERRENT” (his capitalization) to massacres like the one that occurred on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Davis High School in Parkland, Florida. Scattered within those tweets like so much buckshot were three occurrences of the word sicko.

....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!

....If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there...problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

February 19, 2018

On Wednesday, Valentine’s Day 2018, a 19-year-old armed with an AR-15 assault rifle entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire. By the time he dumped his rifle and attempted to flee, he’d killed 17 people, mostly teenagers, and injured more than a dozen.

Mass shootings are shockingly common in the U.S.: there have beenat least 146 in the last half-century, and the rate of their occurrence has tripled since 2011. School shootings, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2015, are a modern phenomenon; they mostly involve young white men like Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter.

How do Americans respond to random, recurring massacres? In Congress and the White House, by offering trite, ineffectual words: “thoughts and prayers.” On social media, though, a different word has surfaced repeatedly, aimed in anger and frustration at those very officials: craven.

January 29, 2018

“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, told Politico’s Isaac Dovere last Tuesday. By “him” Perkins meant the president of the United States. Perkins used the same term in an interview that day with CNN’s Erin Burnett: “Yes, evangelicals, conservatives, they gave him a mulligan. They let him have a do-over. They said we’ll start afresh with you and we’ll give you a second chance.” And he repeated it twice on Thursday in a post he published on FRC.org under his own byline titled “On Morals and Mulligans…” He meant mulligan in its “political” sense, he told his evangelical followers:

I’m not saying his performance as president can buy him grace -- only Christ can do that. And while evangelicals can give him a mulligan regarding their political support, only through repentance and God's forgiveness can he have a totally new start.

Yes, Perkins called in to CNN from Pride, Louisiana. His Twitter bio gives Washington, DC, as his location; it’s where the FRC is headquartered.

January 22, 2018

On January 14, David and Louise Turpin – the parents of 13 children, ages 2 to 29 – were arrested in Perris (Riverside County), California, and later charged with multiple counts of false imprisonment, child abuse, and torture. The children had been starved, beaten, chained to their beds, and permitted to bathe only once a year; they had been home-schooled (minimally), forced to memorize long passages of the Bible, and denied medical or dental care.

David Turpin’s parents told ABC News they were “surprised and shocked” by the allegations because their son and daughter-in-law are “a good Christian family.” “God called on them” to have as many children as they did, the elder Turpins said.

That statement led to speculation in somequarters that David and Louise Turpin might be adherents of a fringe Christian movement called Quiverfull.

December 17, 2017

“One well-chosen verb” gave Doug Jones, the victorious Democrat in last week’s contest for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, the rhetorical advantage over his opponent “Judge” Roy Moore*, writes David Litt in The Daily Beast. At a campaign event a week before the election, Jones

reminded voters of the time Moore had pulled out a pistol at one of his events. “I’m a supporter of the Second Amendment,” Jones declared. “When you see me with a gun, folks, I’ll be climbing in and out of a deer stand or a turkey blind, not prancing around on a stage in a cowboy suit.”

“Judge” Roy Moore ostentatiously prancing to the voting booth on his horse Sassy, who looks skeptical and a little peeved.

December 04, 2017

In the digital world, ownership – or ownage, is it’s often called – is an intangible quality. The tech-jargon sense of to own originated among hackers in the 1990s, who used it to mean “taking control of someone else’s computer”; it was picked up by gamers, for whom it means “to defeat.” (The variant pwn, which originated as a misspelling in the game WarCraft, is sometimes substituted for humorous effect.) To self-own, then, is to confidently blunder into a self-defeating backfire, usually because you’ve unwittingly revealed something embarrassing or incriminating about yourself.